


and if the sun don't shine on me today

by Clones_and_gallifrey



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, once again i got carried away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 15:44:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11293737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clones_and_gallifrey/pseuds/Clones_and_gallifrey
Summary: "Peralta, I swear to God, if you get blue soda in my car, I'll kill you.""Okay, but can I still eat my pocket donut, though?"--Jake and Amy go on a road trip, minus the complicated relationship but still with the poorly disguised feelings. Set in the place of Johnny and Dora.





	and if the sun don't shine on me today

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so Erica write a bunch of AWESOME prompts over on tumblr, and I decided to write this one. It was never supposed to be as long as this but hey since when does anything ever work out how it's supposed to. Sorry if any of the formatting is out, google docs was not my friend on that front.
> 
> This fic is set at the end of s2, in the place of Johnny and Dora. 
> 
> Shout out to both Carrie and Federica for letting me yell about this at them, helping me solve the inevitable problems cropping up along the way, proof reading, and generally being awesome.

Amy Santiago likes order, neatness, and logic. Her life goes by in colour-coordinated socks, and alphabetised movies, books arranged by height, the lemon kitchen cleaner she’s used since her mom bought her a bottle the day she moved into her first apartment. Even her desk, as she looks at it now, is tidy. Papers stacked up neatly, desk decorations arranged just right. So why, _why_ , does she have a dumb smile on her face this whilst watching her partner pulling donuts out of his pocket and eating them, each in one sugar-dusted bite, as he stares at his computer screen? There are clouds of sugar on his desk, and probably they’re going to come over to hers too, and she’s going to have to spend ten minutes cleaning the stickiness from her keyboard. But she can’t stop watching the deep furrow in his brow as he stares at the screen, eating donut after donut without looking at them. 

Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, before the Maple Drip Inn, before Boyle’s dad married Gina’s mom, before the non-date with Detective Dave Majors, she’d have balled up the receipt she can see at the top of her purse (one cup of coffee, one danish pastry), thrown it at Jake, and told him to go eat the donuts outside, or in the bathroom, or really _anywhere_ where she doesn’t have to watch. (And then she’d have picked up the receipt and tossed it into the paper recycling bin, but that’s besides the point.) But all of that stuff did happen, and she’s feeling twelve different emotions, some of which she doesn’t have names for (if she told Jake about the nameless emotions, she knows he’d tell her that one of them’s called Taylor Swift, or something equally ridiculous). 

An hour ago, there were maybe only six emotions aimed at Jake, but then they’d been assigned to the Murdoch case, and told that they need to drive to a town six-and-a-half hours away that Amy’s never even seen on a map, and she’d watched Jake try to talk his way out of it. She’d found it weird for more than one reason, but mainly because it’s a high profile case, and Captain Holt wants them to interview a key witness, so she can’t figure out why he’d try to turn that down. 

Then she’d asked him about it, in the break room, and he’d told her in a dumb accent that he had been planning to ask her out. Now the feelings-aimed-at-Jake have doubled, and the confusion-about-life-in-general is stronger than ever before. She’s trying her best not to panic about it, but the fact that she’s smiling at him eating donuts is signifying that it’s not going well.

 They’ve been given an hour to research the witness. The whole thing’s time sensitive really, because three members of the same family have shown up dead in a twenty-four hour span, and one of them was found with the murder weapon still wrapped around his neck. The murder weapon was an antique necklace, and underneath a heavy dresser nearby they’d found the tag for it, showing it to be from a pawn shop in a town upstate called North Pontiac. When they’d heard the name, Jake had spent five minutes with a panicked look on his face, scrolling through something on his phone, convinced that the whole thing was one big Doug Judy joke.

 The kicker was that a receipt from the very same pawn shop had shown up in the purse of the third victim. There’s a suspect, the estranged son of the first two victims, whose girlfriend lives a couple miles outside of North Pontiac, but there are still a thousand dots to connect. Beginning with the pawn shop owner, who insists that he can only speak with them if they come before opening hours tomorrow. Captain Holt assigns them to the task, referencing the fact that they did such a good job with the prisoner transfer, that they obviously work well together. Amy would have agreed with him once. 

“Hey, Santiago,” Jake tears his eyes away from the screen. Amy forces herself to pull the corners of her mouth down. “Look at this.” He twists the monitor around to face her. “This is our witness,” Jake points at an ageing man with greying hair, sallow skin. It’s a poorly lit Facebook picture. “And _this_ is the suspect’s girlfriend’s uncle.” Jake points at the man standing a little behind the witness. 

“So, what, you think the witness has something more to do with this?” She asks, taking in the scene in the picture. 

“I don’t know. Maybe?” Jake rubs his eye with a donut-sticky hand. 

“It’s a small town, Peralta,” Amy points out, being cautious. It’s not that she doubts him. She knows him well enough not to do that.

 “Yeah. There’s just something about him.” Amy notices that he isn’t meeting her eye. She hates how relieved that makes her. She needs to organise her thoughts, name her emotions and categorise them by intensity. She tries to push them aside, to focus all of her attention on the picture in front of her, but the witness kind of looks like the pictures she’s seen of Jake’s dad. The world is taunting her.

 “Is it because he looks like your dad?” She voices her thoughts, trying her hardest to sound normal.

 They’re going to be spending hours and hours confined in a small car together for the next two days. And tonight there’s going to be another Inn, another town. But this time there won’t be a surprise visit from the guy she’s fallen out of love with. No awkward breakup. No Sophia. Just Jake and Amy and twelve confusing feelings.

 “Huh, I guess he kind of does,” Jake squints at the screen.

 “Peralta, Santiago!” Captain Holt’s voice booms across the precinct. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” They look at each other then, right in the eyes. There are just two seconds, dragging on for twice as long as they should, but they tell Amy all she needs to know. She opens her mouth to say something, to tell him she’s sorry maybe, or try to make a joke, but none of the words come out, and then Jake’s standing up.

 “So, are we taking your car?” He asks, picking up the pen from the desk.

 “My car?” She eyes up the leftover donuts in his pocket. “But you love your car so much!”

 “Well, yeah. My car is far superior. But do you really think it’d survive a thirteen hour trip? Do you wanna take that chance, Santiago?” He asks her, eyebrows raised. His voice is more level now. More like _Jake._

 “Ok,” she thinks about it, not excited about the idea of potentially being stranded on the side of some highway somewhere, waiting for a tow truck. “We’ll take mine.” But then she watches as he reaches down for a drink of _blue._ “Peralta, I swear to God, if you get blue soda in my car, I’ll kill you.” She folds her arms, staring him down. Jake’s eyes flit between the bottle and her face.

 “Okay. But can I still eat my pocket donut, though?” He grins, stuffing the bottle into his bag and gesturing to the donuts.

 “ _No_!” She aims her own bag at his arm, smiling as he dodges at the last second. It almost feels like the old them, until she’s realising that in a matter of seconds they’re going to be trapped in four very narrow walls together for a long time.

  **351 miles to North Pontiac**

 They take two brief pit stops to pick up their overnight bags, having only found out that morning that they would be assigned to interviewing the witness, and that he was insisting on meeting them ridiculously early the next morning. Amy waits in the car whilst Jake takes ten minutes to gather his things, spending them checking her email and then quickly typing out a packing list for herself.

 It’s not awkward, the time between leaving the precinct and pulling away from the sidewalk at her apartment. There’s too much to think about, busy traffic, Jake tuning the radio, Amy loading the route on her phone before they leave her apartment, and therefore _officially_ begin the drive. The official beginning brings a silence which lasts a beat too long, a static kind of tension they’re trying desperately to break.

 Amy’s been thinking a lot about dynamics lately. She’s had plenty of time to think, since she broke up with Teddy. After the initial waves of panic, and then relief, and then appreciation at the fact that her apartment has stopped smelling of yeast, she finds her thoughts wandering to Jake. She’s allowed herself, on a couple of occasions, to let her mind wander to imaginary corners in which they’re dating. So maybe she said no to Teddy’s dinner request after Tactical Village, and maybe that meant Jake didn’t wait until he went undercover for the Romantic Stylez confession. Maybe he tells her, and she’s able to analyse her own feelings rationally, and they go out to dinner, and it’s not weird. And eventually they stop being Jake and Amy and start being JakeandAmy. She’s been thinking about the things that come along with that territory, wondering what it would be like to just lean in and kiss him, and her stomach does the flippy thing it does right before a big test, when the room’s buzzing with a nervous, excited kind of anticipation. If that was it, if she could stop the imaginary scenario there and stop over-thinking, maybe she’d have kissed him a while ago. But the corners of her mind are mottled with anxiety, etched with the remains of second grade girls calling her teacher’s pet, and sixth grade boys asking her out on a dare. Those corners are cruel laughter and all of her heartbreaks and failing recess. So she’s imagining what happens _after_ the happy, and what will happen when (or maybe, if) JakeandAmy have to go back to being just Jake and Amy. It will have some kind of impact on the whole squad, on all of their dynamics. But worst of all, it might mean that she and Jake can’t be friends anymore. That would hurt worse than any kind of break up.

 “What even _is_ this song?” They’re almost out of the city when Jake speaks, a painfully long time later. Amy tunes back in to him, watching as he changes the station from some kind of high pitched warbling.

 “You picked the station in the first place,” she reminds him.

 “And I stand by that decision. It was Jay-Z.” He tells her, settling on a station with a quiet guitar solo.

 Amy bites down on her bottom lip, wondering if actually, it’s just _her_ feeling awkward about this whole thing, because Jake’s being relatively normal. Or at least, acting like himself. She’s over-analysing the situation, wondering if actually it’s just her perceiving the silence as awkward. Maybe it’s really one of those comfortable silences where two people are just content in each other’s company.  

 “Are we-” She starts, unclear what she’s trying to say. “We’re ok, right?” Her voice comes out smaller than intended.

 “Huh?” She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, trying to focus all of her attention on the road ahead. “Amy, of course we are. You don’t wanna date cops. And you’re right, it’s a bad idea. And we’re friends, I don’t want that to change.”

 Relief floods her body. “I don’t want that to change, either,” she tells him.

 “Ok, great. So stop being weird about it,” he reaches across and pokes her shoulder.

 “I’m sorry,” she smiles, watching as his face mirrors hers. He’s the person she wants to pour her heart out to. To talk out the mixed up feelings with. “It’s just…” she doesn’t know how to put them, how to put any of those, into words. “Confusing. Confusing, y’know?”

 “Yeah. I know,” he agrees, his voice soft.

 “I just don’t want to get into it right now,” she says, deciding that now isn’t the time to talk about any of it. It’s just a work trip.

 “Don’t wanna get into it right now, title of your sex tape,” he says, quick to respond. He’s grinning, head tilted to one side, waiting for her to laugh, or punch him in the arm, or shake her head. She does all three, in that order, and then takes a deep breath.

  **298 miles to North Pontiac**

 It’s unusually warm, and by the time they get on the interstate, Jake’s rolled down the window and is sticking his head out, eyes closed against the wind. Amy rolls her window down too, the breeze catching her hair and making it dance around her face. It feels right, the two of them together, the sunshine, this journey. They’ve worked together a hundred times before, stakeouts, roadtrips, working cases at midnight with files littering the break room floor, her hair tumbling out of its ponytail, a million miles from neat. He annoys her like no one else can, but somehow he’s still her favourite person to work alongside. She’d never tell him, but it’s nice to have someone to complement her strategic systems, her combing through case notes in perfect order. The thing is that they work so differently, _think_ so differently, that when it’s hard to crack cases alone, their unique perspectives work together perfectly to fill in each other’s missing links.

  **270 miles to North Pontiac**

 “You wanna play twenty questions?” Jake asks her later, windows closed, AC on.

 “What? Why?” Amy’s preoccupied with changing lanes.

 “Pass the time,” Jake shrugs. “Scared you’re gonna lose, huh?”

 “No! You’d be the one losing, Peralta,” Amy says, certainty in her voice.

 “Oh _really_?”

 “Uh-huh,” she nods.

 “You sure sound confident. For a loser.” He’s smirking now, and she turns to raise her eyebrows at him.

 “Let’s put it to the test then. You go first.”

 “Ok. I already have someone in mind. Ask away. Yes or no questions only.”

 Amy takes a second to think. “Are you a man?”

 “Yes. That was an easy one, pretty much a fifty percent chance of you being right.”

 “Are you famous?” She fires off the next question.

 “Nope!”

 “So, do I know him?” She asks, guessing that she must know the person if they aren’t famous.

 “You do,” Jake confirms.

 “Does he work at the Nine-Nine?”

 Jake seems reluctant to answer. “Maybe. Yes.”

 “Is he white?”

 “No,” Jake mumbles, realising that Amy’s about to guess who it is.

 “Captain Holt?” She takes a guess. Jake is quiet, so she turns to look at him. “I won?” She asks when she finds him resolutely avoiding eye contact with her.

 “Ok fine, you won. But I started with an easy one! Next time, prepare to be crushed,” he assures her.

 “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she shrugs. “Ok, my turn. Go.”

 “You thought of someone already? Ok, ok. Are you human?” Jake begins.

 “What? _Yes_? You can’t pick something non human, Jake!”

 “Ames. Of course you can.” Amy tries to ignore the way her heart alters its pacing a little when he calls her ‘Ames’. It’s dumb, and she’s not a thirteen-year-old girl with her first crush, but they’ve dissolved into ‘Jake’ and ‘Ames’ and she’s not sure there’s any kind of turning back from this.

 “No way. Look it up on your phone. There’ll be some kind of official rule book somewhere, right?”

 “Oh my God,” Jake’s laughing. “An official twenty questions rule book? Who would even write that?” He’s still laughing, but he’s pulling his phone out to check all the same. Amy bites the inside of her cheek to hide her smile.

  **211 miles to North Pontiac**

 The car starts to get low on gas when they’re on a quiet stretch of road, surrounded by fields of cows. They find a rest stop after twenty minutes, a wooden sign with words painted in thick red paint, and Amy pulls off the highway and drives ten minutes to the little rest stop. It’s a weird flat building with a rusting tin roof, the gas station off to one side, announced by a flickering red neon sign. There’s a picnic bench outside of the flat building, occupied by a man with a grey beard and an eye patch eating an ice cream cone. Other than that, the whole place looks abandoned, with no other cars to be seen, two of the main windows boarded up, and one of the gas pumps sealed off with yellow tape and traffic cones.

 “Oh wow,” Jake’s beaming as soon as he’s taken it all in. “I think I had a nightmare about this place once.”

 “Should we stop?” Amy asks him, slowing down, trying to see if the building is actually open or not. The sky, for some reason, is a little greyer here, the sun behind a cloud.

 “Amy, I will literally never forgive you if you _don’t_ stop.” Jake’s already unbuckling his seatbelt as Amy pulls into the gas station area.

 “Do you wanna go in?”

 “We need candy to survive the rest of this journey. Let’s go!” Jake’s already out of the car, so Amy climbs out too.

 She watches as Jake strides over to the main building, past the man eating the ice cream cone, who doesn’t even look up. The air here is too still, too quiet. Amy knows that there isn’t an exact science behind gut feelings, but she’s always trusted hers. And the feeling she’s getting here is a _bad_ one. But they still need gas, and besides the bad feeling, her stomach is rumbling with hunger, so she puts her card into the gas pump and then fills up the tank, remaining aware of her surroundings and hoping that Jake hurries back.

 He doesn’t. She’s filled up the tank and moved her car away from the lone gas pump incase someone else wants to use it. Not that there are any other cars _here_ , which is strange in itself, being only ten minutes from the highway. Amy considers waiting in the car, but the bad gut feeling has all kinds of terrible scenarios going through her mind, so she locks the car doors, tells herself not to be an idiot, and heads for the flat, rusted building.

 The man out front is still staring at the ice cream, which doesn’t seem to have melted. Amy wonders if somehow he’s frozen in time, but she doesn’t stop to ask. Instead, she pulls open the (weirdly cold) door, and steps inside.

 It’s poorly lit, one of the orange lights flickering overhead like some kind of horror movie, and Amy has to remind herself first that this is real life, that nothing bad is going to happen, and second that she’s a _cop_ , so if something bad does happen, she’ll deal with it just fine. The music playing over the speaker system isn’t helping things. It’s like elevator music from the 1970’s, but a little crackly and a little out of tune. It’s a small building, way smaller than it had looked from the outside. There’s a short corridor, paved with lime green linoleum, a dusty statue of a horse standing at the end of it. Amy’s drawn towards it, wondering why the hell there’s some random horse statue, looking like it belongs in a museum, at a rest stop off a highway in New York. She walks to it, passing a small arcade with around six flashing machines in it on her right, and a store with a different brand of creepy elevator music playing to her left. Next to the horse statue are the bathrooms.

 “Amy!” She jumps, breath leaving her lungs as she hears a voice to her right. Amy tears her eyes away from the horse statue. It’s Jake, leaving the men’s bathroom.

 “You _scared_ me!” She hisses, afraid to raise her voice in the quiet building.

 “No, I didn’t scare you, this creepy rest stop scared you. Do you think it’s haunted? The men’s bathroom smells like _blood_!” He’s way too excited about this. Amy tries to shoot him her best disapproving look, but he’s running a finger through the dust on the horse’s leg.

 “No, I do not think it’s _haunted_. It was probably some weird cleaning product, not blood,” she insists.

 “It was definitely blood. I’ve been present at enough crime scenes!” He’s keeping his voice quiet too. Something which he doesn’t even do in libraries.

 “Whatever you say,” Amy tries, yet again, to brush away the uneasy fear.

 There’s a weird twenty seconds where they’re both just staring at the horse statue, and the uneasiness is beginning to change to a sleepy feeling, but then Jake announces that he’s going to get started on the candy shopping and Amy heads into the women’s bathroom.

 The bathroom gives her the creeps more than the exterior of the rest stop, or the man eating the ice cream cone outside, or the weird horse statue. It doesn’t smell like blood, but it’s lit by a neon blue light, and one of the two stalls is locked and emitting a low buzzing sound. Amy’s in there for all of two minutes, but when she comes out there is smooth jazz playing instead of elevator music, and two little girls are standing in the arcade, staring at one of the machines. One of the store windows is broken, and she can’t for the life of her remember whether it looked like that on the way in.

 Amy finds Jake in the store, rifling through a shelf of soda bottles at the back.

 “Ok, so this place is _officially_ creepy,” Amy whispers once she’s next to him.

 “Right? They don’t even have any orange soda! But they have _this_!” He pulls one of the larger bottles from the shelf. The liquid inside is green at the bottom and pink at the top, and the label is in a language she doesn’t recognise. “Should I get it? I should get it.” He adds it to his basket, filled with candy packs and potato chips.

 “Did you maybe want to get some actual, real food?” Amy jokes, still keeping her voice low.

 “Unless you count instant noodles as real food then this is all they have!” Jake tells her, dropping an additional bottle of the green-pink soda into the basket.

 “Do they at least have water?”

 “Not that I’ve seen.”

 “Ok, fine. Just get me…” Amy digs through the soda shelf, which doesn’t seem to have any kind of coherent order to it at all. “This,” she finds a lone bottle of diet coke and drops it in.

 There’s no one at the cash register. It’s coated with a layer of dust similar to the one on the horse, and as they approach it the jazz music seems to get louder. Amy looks through the broken window to the arcade, and the little girls from earlier are gone. Now that she thinks about it, she isn’t sure they were ever there at all.

 “Hello!” Jake calls, finally raising his voice. The uneasy feeling in Amy’s stomach grows.

 “I don’t think there’s anyone-” Amy starts, but then there’s a creaking sound behind them, followed by a small crash. Amy jumps, immediately reaching for Jake’s hand. He mirrors her, breath hitching in his throat, and their hands find each other and grasp on tight.

 They turn their heads quickly to find that a bumper pack of discounted cookies has fallen off the shelf.

 “Oh, it’s just cook - oh my God!” Jake’s turned to face the cash register again, and Amy does the same, jumping yet again when she comes face to face with a pale teenager in a dirty uniform, the name of the rest stop written on the left hand pocket.

 “Welcome to Saint Allison’s rest stop.” His voice is completely monotone. “Did you find everything you were looking for today?”

 Jake and Amy exchange a questioning glance.

 “How did he get there?” Jake asks in a whisper. Then he looks down at their still joined hands, and Amy does the same, but neither one of them really wants to let go.

 “We did,” Amy addresses the teenager, trying to sound normal but coming across as overly enthusiastic. Her speaking prompts Jake to let go of her hand. Amy quickly folds her arms across her chest.

 “Right! We did,” Jake agrees, his voice as high pitched as Amy’s. He places the basket on the counter.

 “Would you like a discounted newspaper?” The teenager asks, voice still monotone, pointing at a pile of newspapers to one side. Amy peers at them, recoiling when she notices the date at the top. They’re over twenty _years_ out of date.

 “No thank you,” she chokes.

 It takes the teenager five whole minutes to scan the items in the basket, and when he’s done, Jake and Amy rush from the building as fast as they can, past the ice-cream-eating man, into her car, and drive away at a not altogether legal speed.

 Jake only speaks when they’re back on the highway. “If we tried to go back there, do you think there’d be anything there?”

 “Of course there would!” Amy snaps. “But let’s not.”

 “God, no.”

  **170 miles to North Pontiac**

 There’s a long queue of traffic as they get closer to their destination, and the traffic report tells them that there’s been an accident and it’s going to be a while till it clears, so Jake turns up the radio and Amy turns up the AC.

 “Ok, this tastes _incredible_ ,” Jake announces, taking a mouthful of the weird pink-green liquid. “Try some?” He holds the bottle out to Amy.

 “Ugh!” She smells it. “It smells like pizza, Jake. How does it smell like _pizza_?”

 “It’s best not to question it.”

 “You’re probably right,” she pushes the bottle back to him. He takes another big gulp.

  **165 miles to North Pontiac**

 “Amy Santiago!” They’ve moved five miles in the past thirty minutes. Amy’s ninety percent sure that the weird drink is alcoholic.

 “Jake, _stop_ drinking it!” Amy’s been telling him to put it down for the past fifteen minutes. He’s only had half the bottle, and she’s trying to do as much pre-emptive damage control as she can.

 “It’s liquid pizza, Ames! It’s the love of my life!”

 “Ok,” she rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling at him, and he’s smiling back, all dopey and wide-eyed. “Take the lid off, and hand it to me.”

 “Oh, I don’t think you should drink this. It’s… what’s the word?” He asks her, squinting against the sun.

 “It’s alcoholic, Jake.”

 “Yeah, maybe. Could be.”

 “Hand it to me! Lid off!” She snaps her finger at him. She can see the cars far in the distance starting to move, so maybe they’ve cleared the accident. That makes this her last chance.

 “Ok, ok, ok, ok,” he fiddles with the lid, managing to unscrew it, and passes the bottle to her. She proceeds to tip the contents onto the road. She’d have thrown the whole bottle out, but it’s plastic, and she’s not going to litter _plastic_. It fizzes onto the ground. “What! No!” Jake groans, reaching for the bottle half-heartedly. “Wait, there’s another bottle!” he starts to dig around in the plastic bag by his feet.

 “No!” Amy beats him to it, picking up the full bottle and tossing it into the back seat. “Don’t even think about taking your seatbelt off to get it, Peralta.”

 “ _Fine_. I’ll find it later. I’ll have…” he digs through the bag again, “this now.”

 “Jake, that’s _my_ coke.”

 “Thanks, Ames. You’re the best.”

  **100 miles to North Pontiac**

 “I’m sorry I was going to ask you out,” Jake says quietly. His brief drunk spell is coming to an end, finishing off with a sombre spell. He’s been gazing out of the window for the past five minutes to the soundtrack of a Coldplay song.

 “Jake, you know you don’t have to apologise for that,” Amy says in an equally quiet voice. He shoots her a sad smile. “You’ve always been honest about your feelings, and that’s an amazing thing about you. And some day… some day, that’s gonna make a girl out there very happy. I mean, right now, she probably has bleach blonde hair and fake tan and is dating a guy named Jesse. She’s definitely pulling a dumb face in her profile picture on Facebook. But she’s waiting for _you_ ,” Amy encourages him, thinking back to the forty-eight hours they’d spent in the precinct after Jake arrested a perp without the evidence to make it stick.

 There’s an odd kind of sadness inside her chest, though, when she thinks about Jake dating someone else. Bleach blonde hair or none. She really, seriously, needs to get her thoughts in order. Because she’s not one of those people who is going to inflict her sadness and confusion on others. She’s not going to try and stop other people from dating Jake just because she doesn’t know what the hell she wants. But it doesn’t mean that the thought of it doesn’t hurt a little. She’s human, it’s allowed to hurt.

 “I don’t want her. Jesse can keep his girl,” Jake says, and he’s watching Amy closely.

 “That’s nice of you,” she stares determinedly at the quiet road in front of her.

  **90 miles to North Pontiac**

 “Hi there, and welcome to McDonalds. Can I take your order?”

 “Hi, two coffees please? No, wait, better make it three.”

 “Three coffees coming right up, ma’am.”

  **50 miles to North Pontiac**

 “Ok so, I promise not to buy any more drinks when I don’t understand what they are,” Jake concedes after a fifteen minute nap, two cups of coffee, and ten minutes of teasing from Amy.

 “Should I get that in writing?”

 “It’s ok, I’m older and wiser now. And I love this song,” Jake comments, turning the volume up. It’s Mmmbop.

 “Oh, man. I was still in middle school when this came out,” Amy remembers.

 “Did they play it at your middle school dances? Did you dance to it? _Is there video footage_?”

 “ _Why_ would there be video footage of that?”

 “I don’t know, but if it exists, it’s very important that I see it,” Jake says, one hand on his heart.

 “Nobody was filming my middle school dances. And I think I only went to one or two of those things, anyway.”

 “What, why? I got my first taste of rejection at a middle school dance! Before I even fell in love with Jenny Gildenhorn!”

 “I was busy doing other things,” Amy shrugs.

 “Like what? What’s more important than learning terrible dance movies in a poorly lit room?”

 “I don’t know. Studying. Band practice. Hanging out with my grandparents.” Amy lists them off.

 “Hanging out with your _grandparents_? That was more important than middle school dances?” He’s grinning again, and things feel right with the world.

 “They were old and lonely!”   

 “Are you sure _you_ weren’t old and lonely?” Jake quips, and Amy shoots him a _look_. “Ok, ok. That’s actually kind of sweet. I’m not trying to say that in a flirty way, I just literally think that’s sweet.”

 “Jake, it’s ok,” she nods. “So, where were you when Mmmbop was a thing?” She’s curious.

 “I used to play… uh… drinking games to it.” Amy doesn’t buy it.

 “ _Drinking_ games! Really? Like what?”

 “Like that… the… never have I ever! That’s a drinking game,” he claps his hands together.

 “It _is_ a drinking game. But I don’t think you played it.” She turns to look at him, staring him down. He’s the first to look away.

 “Ok, fine. It was hacky sack. I used to play hacky sack. And Mmmbop would sometimes be on in the background. Are you happy now?”

 “Oh, yeah. Very happy.” She laughs softly.

 When the song ends, they both reach to turn the radio back down, fingers grazing. The flutters of her heart aren’t going away.

  **10 miles to North Pontiac**

 Amy’s eyes are starting to sting with tiredness and dry contacts and the hiss of the air con, so she breathes a deep sigh of relief when the green sign comes into view, telling her that North Pontiac is only ten miles away. It’s close to the border with Canada, surrounded by forest, the sky somehow seeming bigger, in the way that only happens in the countryside.

 “What kind of hotel did you book?” Jake asks.

 “The _only_ hotel in the town,” she tells him. She had booked it online, right after they’d been told where they were headed that morning. It’s a red brick building in the main street of the town, and their website is straight out of 2002. But apparently it’s been there for over a hundred years, and the rooms are kind of adorable.

 “The _only_ hotel? It’s not… it’s not gonna be like the rest stop again is it?” Jake asks, sounding a little apprehensive.

 “No! I mean… it had good reviews online!” Amy defends it, hoping that Jake’s wrong. She’d rather sleep in her car than in somewhere like that rest stop.

 “Ok, well, we’ll find out in ten miles.”

 It’s only then that Amy realises they’re _almost there_. She’d been dreading this whole awkward journey, but now it’s almost over, and it’s actually been fun. She should have known it would be, because they somehow, despite all of their differences, always find a way to have fun together. Like with him, life’s a little easier, no matter how hard the day has been. Jake strips away life’s rough edges, even in the hardest of situations, and Amy hopes that in one way or another, she’ll be lucky enough to have him in her life forever. He makes her laugh, and it’s undeniable that they fit together, that they come together to make a team. The thought of facing life with him is less overwhelming than thoughts of facing it alone. And maybe that’s all she needs to know to make it work.

  **North Pontiac**

 They drive into North Pontiac as the world is darkening around them, into a warm evening, and find the town’s main street without any trouble, as there really aren’t many other streets to speak of.

 As it turns out, the hotel is not creepy. The exterior is as advertised, and whilst the inside is a little rougher around the edges, it’s nice too. Amy’s room is decorated in shades of pink, so bright that it hurts her eyes a little at first, but it’s clean and comfortable and most importantly it doesn’t give her the creeps. She’s agreed to take twenty minutes before going to meet Jake for dinner, and digs through her bags for the soft red dress that she’s packed. In truth, she had packed in such a rush that she’d grabbed the nearest item of restaurant-appropriate clothing, and now that she pulls it on she worries that it’s too much. She’s only worn it once in the six months that she’s owned it. At first it was because she was using any kind of excuse to avoid dinner with Teddy, spending most of her time working instead, but since then she just hasn’t had the opportunity, choosing to go to quiz nights with Kylie instead of going out in the red dress.

 Before leaving the hotel room, Amy does three things. The first is to smile at herself in the full-length, pink edged, mirror. She’s watched four TED talks about how you have the ability to change your own mood, and one of the ways of doing is that by smiling at yourself, and tricking your brain into thinking that you’re happy, and confident, and generally _not_ freaking out because you maybe (probably, inconceivably, definitely) have a huge crush on one of your best friends. The second thing she does is to find the lipstick in her purse. It’s her emergency lipstick, because she didn’t plan on _any of this_ , but now she’s whispering a thank you to her Great Aunt who kept an emergency lipstick in her purse until the day she died (Amy and her mom had helped to sort through her things after she passed, and they’d pulled a tube of coral pink from the purse hanging behind the front door), and had urged Amy to do the same.

 The third thing she does it to take a deep breath, before she opens the door and steps into unknown territory. She isn’t sure, really, what she’s stepping into. What she does know is that her heart will _not_ slow down, and that she’s smiling at the thought of seeing her partner’s face again. It’s not an uncommon thing, to enjoy being around Jake, because most of the time he’s fun to be around. Most of the time, he makes her laugh. But she’s never been so happy at the prospect of eating dinner with him.

 She thinks about dinners they’ve shared together, in all of the years working together. Usually, the dinners are eaten across their desks, picking at Chinese food absently as they discuss a case, or sometimes they sit on the ground around her coffee table, dinner in their laps and files spread around them in an abstract collage. One time they ate warm slices of Sal’s pizza at eleven p.m, sitting on a wall further down the street, feet resting against the brick beneath them. Once, after the fateful Greig case of Winter 2012, he’d come to her house with soup, just to make sure she remembered that she had to eat.

 He’s standing in the hotel lobby when she comes down the stairs, typing something out on his phone with a smile on his face, a clean button down on under his leather jacket.

 “You ready to go?” She asks as she approaches him.

 “Amy, I-” he starts, looking up from his phone. He stops when he notices her, dressed in red, her expression apprehensive. There’s a second, maybe half, of silence whilst he studies her. “You look nice,” he tells her, his voice quiet and measured.

 “Thanks,” she smiles at him. Their eyes meet, and Amy’s veins flood with a happy brand of safety and comfort and familiarity. “So should we go?” She nods at the main entrance to the hotel.

 “Oh, yeah, right. Dinner.”

\--

It takes them all of three minutes to walk to the end of the street, where the restaurant sits. There’s a mildly ripped banner hanging over the door, proclaiming ‘grand opening’, but it’s drooping and greying. For all Amy knows, it’s been there for five years, and is just a part of the building’s facade now. The restaurant is small, with five booths arranged in a L-shape around the counter, and the decor makes Amy wonder whether the grand opening sign might be _twenty_ years old rather than five.

 “Welcome!” A smiling older lady with frizzy brown hair greets them as they step inside. She’s wearing a bright green polo shirt, and her blue eyes sparkle when they catch the candles from the tables.

 “Hi,” Amy smiles, “table for two?” Jake’s standing weirdly straight next to her.

 “I’m sure I can find somethin’ for a lovely couple like yourselves,” the woman beams.

 “Oh, we’re-” Jake starts.

 “Gracie!” Another woman is yelling from behind the counter, waving a piece of paper at the first woman.

 “What is it Mol?” The first woman, Gracie, Amy assumes, asks.

 “Get over here!” Mol tells Gracie.

 “I’m sorry, would you mind waiting for just a moment?” Gracie asks them, apologetic. She doesn’t wait for an answer.

 Amy takes a proper look around the restaurant as they wait. There are candles on every table, and two of the five booths are occupied, both by couples, one a teenage couple nervously holding hands across the table and the other must be in their late twenties or early thirties, both staring down at their phones.

 “That’s gotta be some kind of fire hazard or something,” Jake’s back to talking in an awkwardly weird, unidentifiable accent. Amy frowns at him as he points vaguely in the direction of the nearest candle.

 “I think it’s supposed to be atmospheric,” Amy shrugs, turning to look at the teenage couple as the boy starts to laugh loudly.

 “I’ve got some good news for you!” Gracie is back, smiling wider than Amy ever thought it was possible to smile.

 “Oh no,” Amy hears Jake say under his breath. She, too, braces herself for the worst.

 “It looks like you’re the one-hundredth couple to come to the restaurant since our grand opening!” Gracie announces, throwing her arms into the air.

 “But we’re-” Amy’s about to protest but then there’s loud music playing and the door labelled ‘kitchen’ is opening, producing Mol followed by a waitress and a woman in a chef’s hat, all dancing over to them.

 “Congratulations!” Mol is placing a paper crown on Amy’s head.

 “Oh, this is happening,” she tries to look up to see the crown, her eyes crossing in the process.

 “Your meal’s on us! And you get a free bottle of wine!” The waitress tells them, pausing in her dancing to push her red hair out of her eyes.

 “Wow. Did you hear that Ames? Free food? Free _alcohol_ ,” he’s nodding at her, willing her to go along with it. Amy looks between Jake and Gracie, both of whom are smiling, but in very different ways.

 “If you’d like to sit down over here?” The chef is gesturing to the nearest booth.

 “Ok then,” Amy’s laughing nervously, and then Jake is clearing his throat and offering her his arm for the four-step walk across to the booth.

 “Ames,” he gestures at his arm. She links her arm with his cautiously and they take the steps to the booth, letting go seconds later to sit across from each other.

 “Hundredth couple!” The waitress is producing a handful of actual rose petals from her pocket and scattering them across their table.

 “Hundredth couple!” The teenage girl at the booth behind theirs is standing up and clapping.

 “We’ll have to take a picture to put up on the wall,” Gracie announces, “go get the camera, Mol!”

 “A picture? Is it that big of a thing?” Jake asks, his voice a little choked.

 “You’re the _hundredth couple_ , sweetheart,” Gracie says, smiling fondly at them.

 “Here’s your wine!” The waitress has picked a bottle of wine from behind the counter. She puts it down and Amy glances at the label, light against the red liquid.

 “ _What_!” Jake looks up at the same time as Amy. “It’s the-”

 “The wine drink!” She finishes his sentence. It’s the very same wine drink that every member of the Nine-Nine had bought to Captain Holt’s birthday party the year before.

 “You like that one, huh?” The chef is asking them.

 “Oh, yeah. I’m a big fan of this… this wine drink. It’s got subtle hints of…” his eyes hone in one the yellow squares on the chef’s hat, “lemon. And notes of sunflower.” Amy bites her lip to hide her smile.

 “Sweetie, that’s a _red_ wine drink. You’re thinking of the white wine drink!” The chef chuckles.

 “No, it’s definitely this one. Lemon and sunflower,” Amy taps the bottle with her index finger.

 “Are you sure about that?” The waitress asks.

 “Yeah. We run a wine blog,” Amy says, straight faced. She can see Jake struggling to keep his own face straight from the corner of her eye.

 “Here’s the camera!” Mol is back, brandishing a black digital camera.

 “Great work, Mol!” Gracie reaches for the camera. “Ok, give your girl a kiss, sweetie,” Gracie gestures at Jake, who freezes.

 “A what now?” He splutters.

 “A kiss for the picture!” Gracie clarifies.

 “We need one for the picture!” Mol clicks her fingers at them.

 “Oh.” Amy turns to look at Jake. He’s looking at her too, eyes wide, lips parted a little. She wants to kiss him. That’s the first time she’s known that to be true, the first time she’s allowed herself to think it. His lips are a little chapped and she’s got the fluttery feeling at the pit of her stomach and _God_ , she wants to kiss Jake Peralta.

 “I guess…” Jake shrugs at her, and she nods a little back at him, and then they’re leaning towards each other over the sticky table in their booth.

 For a second, Amy forgets that they’re being watched by the entire staff and all of the patrons at a random restaurant in a tiny town called North Pontiac. There’s just his brown eyes drawing nearer to her, her breath catching in her throat. She’s got memories of Jake to fill all of the scrapbooks at her favourite stationery store. Some of them are bad ones, but most of them are good - the peanuts on the rooftop and him teaching her to dance before he went undercover and the Jimmy Jab Games and every time he’s been for her there when she’s been a million miles from ok. And now there’s a bottle of wine drink between them and they are an inch from kissing each other. Their lips only touch for a second, whilst the camera clicks. Her hand is on his face, and his lips are softer than anticipated. And there are no actual fireworks, but it feels _right_ , and she when they break apart after a second or two, she wants to do it again.

 “Perfect!” Gracie is giving them a thumbs up, and Amy’s reminded that she is, in fact, surrounded by people.

 “ _Perfect_? Strong word. Her lips are.. Super chapped,” Jake says defensively.

 “Oh, yeah. And he hasn’t brushed his teeth in fifteen years so, I mean, would you wanna kiss that?” Amy asks the staff team as a whole.

 “Love is blind, sweetheart,” Mol chips in, peering over Gracie’s shoulder at the picture on the camera screen.

 “Mmhmm,” Amy’s voice is six octaves higher than it should be.

 “Ok well, we’ll leave you love birds alone for now! Let Angelica know when you’re ready to order,” the chef gestures at the waitress.

 “We will,” Jake’s trying to smile but it looks much more like a grimace. There’s silence as the crowd around the disperses. “Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Nicely done. Free food,” Jake says quickly, once everyone has walked away.

 “We couldn’t say no to free food,” Amy agrees, “and the _wine drink_. As if we could turn that down.”

 “Right. Good. Cool.” Jake looks down at the napkin on the table in front of him. “Hey do you think I could turn this into an origami-”

 “Excuse me. Sir?” The teenage boy from the booth behind theirs is standing up and addressing Jake.

 “Uh, yeah?” Jake looks up from the napkin.

 “Could I speak with you for just a moment?” The boy nods at a dark corner of the restaurant.

 Jake shrugs and follows him to corner, throwing a questioning look over his shoulder at Amy as he goes. She realises that she’s digging her fingers into the soft seat of the bench, so hard that it’s hurting her nails. This is the weirdest night she’s had since Teddy tried making four different Christmas pilsners and she came home from a long shift to find him in an elf onesie and blue swimming goggles, highlighting seemingly random lines of a recipe with a Queen playlist on his laptop in the background. Sure, this town may not be creepy to the level of the rest-stop-that-shall-not-be-named, but it’s not _normal_. Maybe it’s the town’s fault that her eyes are following Jake as he talks to the boy and now Gracie, a slightly horrified expression on his face. Maybe it’s the town’s fault that her lips are _tingling_ , like every stereotypical protagonist in the books she learned about kissing from, often by torchlight in the middle of the night because they had become impossible to put down. Amy often wonders what genre her life would be put into if it were a book. Right now, she’s sure it would be one of those cliche romance novels that gets turned into a Jennifer Aniston movie and rated at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes by _serious critics_. But she kind of doesn’t care. She’s always thought that those serious critics were wrong, anyway.

 Jake’s back in front of her as quickly as he had left, but now he’s reaching for her shoulders and leaning forward to whisper something in her ear. Amy freezes, unsure what she’s supposed to be doing. She’s sure she could figure it out if only Jake didn’t smell like that damn body spray he’s been using for as long as she’s known him, and also a little bit like the strawberry candy from the creepy rest stop.

 “Just go along with this, ok? I didn’t know how to say no,” he’s squeaking more than whispering, and Amy starts to panic, looking around expectantly.

 Jake lets go of her and stands back, taking a deep breath as he does, and the crowd that had dispersed just moments ago has returned. It seems to happen in slow motion. Amy watches as Jake says something under his breath, something she can’t decipher, and then he’s grimace-smiling at her again and slowly lowering himself to the ground. He’s on one knee. Amy claps her hands over her mouth, her eyebrows arching as high as they can go. Of all of the things she had considered that he could possibly mean when he told her to go along with it, this was _not_ one of them.

 “What?” Is all she can say, muffled through her hands.

 “Amy Santiago,” his voice is a little choked, panic evident in his eyes. “Will you… uh… will you make me the happiest man in America? By marrying me, I mean. Not anything weird. Just marriage. To me.” He’s somehow found a ring somewhere. It’s overly shiny with a gemstone that Amy thinks might be made of glass, but he’s holding it out to her and everyone is leaning in with baited breath. This isn’t the first time he’s fake proposed to her, but this time one is a world away from the last one.

 Of all of the reactions Amy could have, her body chooses laughter. She drops her hands into her lap and starts laughing, a little at first, but then soon her shoulders are shaking with it and her eyes her scrunched shut and the whole situation is the most ridiculous thing. And it could only happen to them.

 “Uh, Ames?” Jake’s voice snaps her out of it. Everyone’s still leaning in, waiting for her response, but now they’re mostly wearing pained expressions. They expect her to say no. It only takes Amy a split second to decide what she has to do.

 “Uh, yes! Of course I’ll marry you!” Amy tries to keep the awkwardness out of her voice, choosing instead to reach for the ring.

 “She said yes! She said yes,” Jake announces, standing up and actually bowing as everyone in the restaurant, including the chef who has returned from the kitchen, starts to applaud them. “We’re getting married!” Jake holds up a hand for Amy to high five.

 “Married! Wow!” She brings her hand up to meet us, hitting it so hard that her hand stings.

 The ring sits heavy on her left hand, and for the rest of the night it feels like all eyes are on them. They both sink back into their seats across from each other in the booth, fake smiles stuck in place.

 One day, Amy wants to get married for real. It’s written on the life plan, and even though, in her mind, it sits at a lower priority to making Captain, it’s something she’s wanted since she were a kid. She can remember asking her mom questions about relationships, about what it was like to be married, and her mom telling her that it sometimes it was difficult, sure, but really it was love and safety and always having someone to come home to at the end of the day. Someone to celebrate your successes with and commiserate with you when something didn’t go as planned. Someone to hold your hands through the bad days. Not so long ago, the idea of marrying _Jake_ had never even crossed her mind. But now she’s wearing the ridiculously large ring, and everyone in the restaurant keeps smiling in their general direction, and the thought of actually, for real, marrying him doesn’t stir up negative feelings, exactly. Maybe they’re not completely positive either, but they’re up there. Amy’s learned not to see life in shades of black and white, but if she did, marrying Jake would be a paint spillage, rivers of it flowing to all areas of the spectrum. He meets the criteria her mom inadvertently set out all those years ago, anyway. If there’s one person she wants to celebrate her successes with, it’s Jake. And he just so happens to be the same person who’s best at picking her up on bad days.

 Either way, they get a free three course meal. Overall it’s not the best meal in the world, but the cheesecake they get for dessert is good, one slice between them with two spoons. Gracie takes another picture of them on the way out, but this time nobody makes them kiss so they just stand awkwardly next to the door with smiles on their faces. Mol tells them they’ll get free meals for life and that she’s married to the pastor who will conduct a ceremony for them for half the price, and will throw in two baby baptisms for the price of one.

\--

 They walk back to the hotel slower than they had walked to the restaurant, trying to stretch three minutes into five or six or ten, because when they get back to the hotel they’re going to go their separate ways. Amy’s dreading the hours before she can go to sleep, knowing that the thoughts in her head will be magnified by darkness and silence and the uncertainty of her own emotions.

 “Where’d you get this?” Amy asks, holding up the hand with the ring on, a whole minute into their walk back. It’s a foreign feeling, the heavy ring on her finger. It’s not practical and she’s sure it’d get in the way of everyday tasks, but she still isn’t in a rush to take it off.

 “Oh, God, I forgot about the ring,” Jake stops in his tracks.

 “How could you forget about it? Have you _seen_ the size of it?” Amy waves her left hand in front of his eyes.

 “Yeah, it’s truly hideous,” Jake agrees. “But that kid sold it to me. He was gonna propose to his girlfriend but he said we were-” Jake raises his hands to form air quotes with his fingers “the cutest couple ever, dude,” he uses a deeper voice for the quote.

 “He was gonna propose? Weren’t they like, sixteen?” Amy asks.

 “I guess things move faster in small towns.”

 “No kidding.”

 They start walking again and lapse back into silence. It’s not another one of the awkward silences, Amy just gets the impression that whatever’s said next is going to mean something. It’s going to define this whole thing. She’s going through all of the options in her head as they walk along the quiet street. They could repeat the whole spiel about being professionals and staying friends and not wanting to date cops, for example. That’s what they should do, she thinks. That’s what they should do because dating someone that you work with _is_ messy. And she doesn’t want to lose Jake as a friend because of something that’s probably (definitely) a mistake. Which brings her to option two, The Probable Mistake. She could change things right now in a whole different way. She could tell him everything going on inside her head. She could tangle her fingers with his. She could kiss him.

 “Sorry about all of that stuff,” It’s Jake who breaks the silence.

 “It’s fine. Really,” Amy says quickly. Jake’s broken the silence, so she decides that what happens next is down to him.

 “It was just for the free food. And besides, I think that they would have run us out of town if we hadn’t accepted the hundredth couple thing.” His voice is light and casual, like there’s really nothing to discuss.

 “Oh, yeah. They would have,” Amy agrees, trying her hardest to sound casual too. “It’s ok, though. It was kind of fun.”

 “It was,” Jake’s smiling _that smile_ at her again. The one that stops her from being able to look away. The one she’s seen so many times before. The one that she sometimes think about, late at night, holding it close to her heart. “That’s not even the first engagement ring I’ve ever given you.”

 “Out of the two I think it’s somehow _worse_ than the one dollar one,” Amy says, looking down at the weird way it catches the light.

 “Well, that one was twenty times as expensive.”

 “You spent a whole _twenty dollars_ on me? Wow. You’re really something special,” Amy pretends to wipe a tear from her eye.

 “I know, right!” Jake pretends to do the same. “Seriously though, twenty dollars is nothing. You don’t even wanna know how much I spent in addition to the dollar ring on our date after you lost the bet last year.”

 “You what?” Amy stops. Jake stops next to her.

 “Oh, yeah. I mean it’s no big deal. I’m just gonna be paying it off till I, like, die, probably, but, it’s fine, it was worth it!” He shrugs, like it really is no big deal.

 “Jake, _why_?”

 “I…” He looks a little lost for a second. “It was worth it.” He stuffs his hands into his pockets, smiling sadly at her.

 At first, Amy doesn’t know what to say. They just stand still, beside each other, across from the only liquor store in North Pontiac. Seconds click by whilst Amy takes Jake’s words in, whilst she thinks about catching Jake’s stakeout bag nuts in their mouths on the rooftop. About the steerage jig and the ridiculous blue dress.

 Then she thinks about how, given the choice, there’s nowhere in the whole world that she’d rather be than standing in this weird small town on the border with Canada, with Jake.

 And then she closes the distance between them with a step, takes his face in her hands, and kisses him.

 At first he’s statue still, frozen to the spot, but then his arms are curling around her back, his lips moving against hers, and nothing in the whole history of time has ever felt so right. Jake pulls her closer and her hands move into his hair, and she’s kissing him like it’s the last chance she’ll get. Like the whole world could melt away around them and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.

 They pull apart and press their foreheads together, her brown eyes looking into his. Her hands stay tangled in his hair, his resting on her back, until they take a step back from each other, neither one really sure of what to say.

 “Uh-”

 “That-” They both start to speak at the same time.

 “You go. You speak first,” Amy offers, unsure what to do with her hands now. She settles on folding her arms.

 “Was that… was that like a genuine kiss, or…?” He trails off, placing his own hands on his hips.

 “Uh… I guess so. Yep.”

 “Oh. Oh! I mean, do you like… do you wanna talk about it? Or something?”

 “Um,” Amy’s smiling. She can’t _stop_ smiling. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing, or how she’s feeling, but she can’t stop _smiling_. “I definitely do. Want to talk about it, I mean. But I just… I maybe need some time to think about it?” She isn’t convinced that more time to think about it is going to help her in any way, but it’s worth a shot.

 “Yeah, of course. That’s cool. That’s totally noice.” Jake’s nodding and not showing any signs of stopping.

 “So I guess we should just go back to our hotel rooms? I think?” Amy’s not regretting the kiss. What she is regretting is the _timing_ of the kiss.

 Because they’re still here together, and they’re here for actual work, and tomorrow they’ve got to be professional partners, and then there’s a long car ride home. That’s a long time for two people to go with an unresolved _thing_ sitting between them like some kind of gremlin.

 “Yeah. I think that’s a good idea. We need to be well rested for tomorrow, anyway. So good thinking, Detective,” he’s stopped nodding now and is looking in the general direction of the hotel.

 “Right. Thanks for thinking so, fellow Detective.” But then she remembers. “Oh, crap, Jake. We still haven’t finalised the questions for tomorrow. We need to do that. We need to do that like, right now.”

 “Oh. Yeah. That. So, uh, your hotel room or mine?”

\--

They spread the files out around them on Amy’s bed, and she sits cross-legged on a pillow, leaning against the headboard, whilst Jake sits on his knees on the opposite corner of the bed. It takes them an hour to come up with a strategy for questioning the witness and five minutes to clear the papers away, and then ten minutes on top of that to talk about the case as a whole. By that time Amy’s eyelids have never felt heavier, and she’s using all of her energy to fight off sleep. She’s watched Jake sinking lower and lower, and now he’s curled into a ball, head about to fall off the end of the bed.  

 “Jake?” She nudges him with her foot. She’s aware that she, too, has been sinking lower. Her head is on the pillow now, which is something she didn’t plan on.

 “Hmm?” Jake’s eyes open suddenly.

 “Are you sleeping?” Amy asks, groggily.

 “Is it Monday? Ames?” Jake sits up slowly, blinking around at his surroundings.

 “Why are you asking if it’s Monday?” She bites her lip to hide her smile.

 “Oh. I don’t know,” he frowns. “I should go.”

 “It’s ok,” she says quickly. “If you wanted to stay and talk, I mean. You don’t have to go right now. We could talk about the case! Professionally, I mean.”

 “Do you think… do you think the witness did it?” Jake’s laying back down, but this time it’s his feet that are hanging off the end, his head landing where his feet were before.

 “What? No. He’s just a witness. Isn’t he?” But Amy’s brain is heavy with sleep.

 “You said it yourself,” Jake mumbles, “he looks like my dad. And my dad’s not a great dude. My goal in life is _not_ to turn out like my dad,” Jake says into the blankets.

 “That won’t happen, Pineapples,” Amy’s eyes close as she reaches a hand out to touch Jake. She can just about reach the top of his head, so she lets her hand rest there, fingers tangling in his curls again. “You’re one of the good guys.”

 “So are you, Ames.”

 Amy falls asleep with a smile etched onto her face and something like love sitting comfortably in her chest.

\--

When Amy looks back on the North Pontiac trip in years to come, she’ll marvel at just how strange those two days were. If the first day wasn’t strange enough, the second potentially tops it. If the creepy rest stop incident had happened on day two, then it would have hit the all-time-record for Amy Santiago’s weirdest day. As it happens, the weirdness is distributed, kind of evenly, over both days.

 They wake up to a phone ringing at seven-fifteen on day two, and Amy is hit with the realisation that a) they fell asleep in the same bed, and b) they have approximately twenty-five minutes to get to where they need to go. And they’re still in the same clothes as last night. In fact, if Amy looks in the mirror, she’s pretty sure she will find smudged makeup and dark circles and the expression of someone who, really, has no idea what they’re doing any more.

 It’s point A that she realises first, because during the night she’s wiggled further down the bed, and Jake’s wiggled further up, so that whilst they’ve mostly retained their personal space, his hand is sitting on top of hers in the middle of the bed, and their heads are bowed together (just like after they had kissed. Point C, incidentally, is the memory of the kiss). Point B is revealed when Amy groans, turns over, and finds her phone blinking ‘07:15’ at her. After a split second of recalling all of the information necessary to her day, it dawns on her that there are twenty-five minutes, and that twenty-five minutes are _not enough._

 Somehow, largely due to the tiny size of North Pontiac, they make it to the pawn shop to interview the witness before opening time. Amy’s hair is still kind of a mess, and Jake’s stomach won’t stop growling, and neither one of them has addressed the fact that they fell asleep together, but they make it. The pawn shop is dusty and the witness is grumpy and reluctant, but there’s no way that any of that could have tipped Amy off to the next crazy event of the day.

 The next crazy event is that Jake had been right. He’d been right back in the precinct when he’d theorised that the witness had some connection to the suspect. He’d been right last night when, voice thick with sleep, he’d mentioned it again, just because the witness bore a resemblance to his father. He’d somehow, impossibly, been right. It takes thirty-nine minutes of questioning, but the witness starts talking about one of the victims, the suspect’s dead mother, and then he’s sobbing so much that his chest is heaving and he can’t get a breath in. And then he admits that he helped the original suspect to kill each of the victims. That he did it for love.

 “ _Never_ murder for love, man,” Jake tells him as they cuff him, after he’s been read his rights. “Girls do _not_ dig that. Right, Santiago?” Jake raises his eyebrows at her.

 “Right.” Things feel ok, now. They feel like they’re getting back to what they used to be. Talk or no talk.

 They call the local Police Department to transport him to the station, a whole five minute drive away. The man on the other end of the line is so shocked when they tell him what’s happened that he spends two minutes choking on his morning coffee before agreeing to come out to them himself. All that’s left to do then is to wait at the door of the pawn shop, handcuffed man sitting on an office chair between them, tears still rolling down his cheeks.

 They watch the occasional car pass by, a dog walker, a shuffling elderly lady, and finally a smiling couple, before either of them says anything more.

 “So we should have that talk. On the way home,” Amy says, knowing that now isn’t a good time to bring it up, but also not really caring.

 When has there ever been a good time for anything? When has life ever really shown itself to be plannable? She’d like to think that it is. She’d like to live each day in service of her life plan, pinned in her bedroom at home. But sometimes there’s a curveball. And just sometimes, that’s a good thing.

 “Yeah. Ok,” Jake agrees, leaning back against the doorframe.

 “I’ve got some important stuff I need to say. And before you think anything negative, I… I don’t regret the kiss.”

 “You don’t?” Jake asks in shock.

 “I don’t.”

 There’s a pause.

 Honey,” the pawn shop owner pipes up, his voice wobbly with tears. “Life’s too short. And any fool can see that you want to be together. You’ve been making eyes at each other since you walked in that door,” he ends his words with a hiccup, and breaks into a fresh round of sobs.

 At that moment, the police car rolls up in front of the store, and Jake goes out to greet them.

\--

**351 miles to home**

 “So, um. That talk,” Amy jumps in, unable to wait a moment longer, as soon as the welcome sign for North Pontiac is visible in her rear-view mirror.

 “Yeah. _That_ talk,” Jake’s smiling the smile at her again, and it takes all of Amy’s effort to keep her eyes on the road.

 “Jake, I know I said I didn’t want to date cops. But I really like you.” And she does.

 And she doesn’t know what comes next, or how they navigate this thing, or if it will work. She doesn’t know what happens if it doesn’t, or how all of the dynamics at work will change if it _does_. She doesn’t know how this fits in with her life plan. What she does know is that it feels right. That she doesn’t want anything else, right now, except for this.  

 “I really like you too,” Jake says, and he holds out his hand. This time, it isn’t for a high five. This time, Amy just tangles her fingers up with his. Once upon a time, her mom had told her that the person you should spend your life with is the one who you want to hold hands with, through all of it. And sure, maybe she won’t spend her life with Jake, who knows. But no one else’s hand fits quite as well with hers. So she’s going to hold on tight.

**Author's Note:**

> So there we go!
> 
> Your comments and messages make my day. Come say hi on tumblr @jakelovesamy


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